An Australian Year in Review

I'm a sucker for end-of-year lists and reviews, about politics, sports, music, professional aardvark racing, whatever. So I watched the end-of-year review on the WIN network this evening, and I thought the order accurately showed some of the emphasis Australians place on things...

The Year according to WIN:

1) Steve Irwin's death. Yep, big news. This was a quarter of the hour-long broadcast.

2) Sports wrap-up. Australia's good showing at the soccer World Cup in Germany; hosting the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne; the retirement of Olympic gold medalist swimmer Ian Thorpe; the championships of the National Rugby League and Australian Football League.

3) Politics. Kevin Rudd beats Kim Beazley in a leadership challenge to become head of the Australian Labor Party as they prepare for elections in September 2007. Prime Minister John Howard continues to insist going into Iraq was a good decision, an assessment that WIN's political analyst noted his fellow Australians increasingly do NOT share. The emergence of climate change as a big issue in Aussie politics, and labor relations. (Note that the entire political year was covered in less time than was devoted to local sports!)

4) The death of "Peter Perfect," Australian auto racing legend Peter Brock, in a racing accident. Brock was a big figure here. (Three of the top four stories were sports and celebrity deaths...)

5) Evacuation of Australians from Lebanon. There is a significant Lebanese-Australian community here, and there were a lot of Aussie citizens in Lebanon when Israel's bombardment began. Nearly 5000 Australian citizens were evacuated.

6) The Beaconsfield mine disaster. Two miners spent two full weeks underground after a cave-in in this mine in Tasmania, before being rescued to acclaim. It was a real media orgy, and a classic Australian story about two regular guys who survived a pretty tough ordeal.

An Assortment of Aussie News

Yesterday, it rained in Canberra, over 10 millimeters (about .4 inches). Yes, in 2006, in Canberra, a "heavy" rain like that qualifies as front page news. The drought continues although climatologists hope that a weakening in the El Nino in the Pacific will bring back more normal precipitation to southeast Australia. Bizarrely, some towns in higher elevations in Victoria and Tasmania actually enjoyed a white Christmas, as freak mid-summer snows dropped and helped dampen some of the wildfires in those two states.

Canberra continues with "Stage 3" water restrictions, which limit you to watering your lawn once a week, and place other limits on how or whether you can put water on plants in your yard. It's a pretty dry place, in some ways the yellowing lawns reminding me of southern California or Denver. At least the rain seems to have lessened the threats of wildfires in town, something locals have been reminded of again this week as a commission released a report damning the authorities' response to the firestorm that struck Canberra in January 2003, killing four and burning 500 houses in a Canberra suburb only a couple of miles from where we live...

The other big news in Australia this week -- they beat England again in the Ashes cricket tests, extending their lead to 4-0. They hope to complete the shut-out in the last five-day test in Sydney this weekend.

And "professional celebrity" Paris Hilton has landed in Sydney. She's here on some promotional gig for some beer (if I knew it's name I wouldn't print it here), and doing the usual Paris Hilton activities -- hanging out on Bondi Beach, shopping in Sydney's poshest stores, and probably doing drugs and inducing vomiting to keep her skinny-ass protruding-hip figure just as it is.

The Funniest Christmas Gift I Received in 2006

Observations on the Word "Pom"

Is "pom" a derogatory term? Pom is what the Australians frequently/usually call the English. It can be used as a noun, as in "bloody poms," or as an adjective as in "pommie bastards"

The frequency of the word "pom" and its variants in the Aussie press has increased dramatically over the past month as England's cricket team has come to contest the Ashes. The fact that Australia has just re-taken the Ashes with an insurmountable 3-0 lead has brought about even more gleeful headlines about sticking it to the pom. (The press coverage has been incredibly over-the-top. You'd think Australia had just landed a man on mars. But wait, given the Aussie sports obsession and a certain suspicion of intellectual pursuits like science, an important Aussie cricket or football victory would probably still rate above landing an Aussie spaceship on an alien planet. And the announcement today that top bowler Shane Warne is retiring from international cricket after this series is being treated like a royal death.)

This article notes how Australia's advertising watchdog (and some English dude who heads up a local brewery) said pom isn't necessarily a bad word, depending on the context, comparing it to Kiwi (New Zealander) or Aussie. I dunno. It seems somewhat less affectionate to me.

Maybe this is where Mel Gibson gets his famous anti-English animus!

Some Christmas Observations from Down Under

The big day is approaching and you know, it really isn't beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. Yes, there are plenty of clues that the day is approaching. For example, one store advertised on TV that it is staying open extra-late all this week -- to the ungodly hour of 7 PM. Yes, that's LATE for an Australian store.

The malls and department stores have plenty of Christmas decorations -- but much less than we put up in the States. Same with the streets -- I've seen some outside decorations in Canberra, but nothing like Arlington or Dayton or New York.

On the other hand, the PEOPLE show real signs of being ready for Christmas. All the restaurants are packed at lunchtime with people out for office parties, and many of the people, especially the women, wearing various absurd Santa hats or fake reindeer ears or other cranial decorations.

And speaking of celebrations, my office had one last Friday at a nice Italian restaurant in downtown Canberra. I was parked in the pay lot near the restaurant (very little free parking in central Canberra) and went out once to re-up my stay, but ultimately didn't get out to the car till half an hour after my permit had expired. I groaned because I saw a parking lot attendant looking at my permit in the window, and I thought she was writing a ticket. So I walked up and politely said, "Ma'am, I'm right here, so you can just hand me the ticket instead of leaving it on the window." She said "Oh, I haven't written it yet" -- and ambled off WITHOUT giving me a ticket. An early Christmas present, I guess.

One other thing...

A little thing I just read in the paper today shows one difference between American and Australian Christmas traditions. In America, we put out milk and cookies for Santa's midnight snack. In Australia? A nice cold beer.

Quarantine and the Unglamorous Side of Sydney

Last week we went to visit our cats in the Eastern Creek facility run by the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service (AQIS). It was pretty impressive. We only saw the cattery, but each cat had its own four-level cage, open to the air, the cages big enough for me to stand in easily. Not bad. And the attendants and vets were attentive and clearly loved working with animals. The quarantine restrictions are a bit over the top (you could even say absurd) but at least the critters are well cared for. We saw dogs and horses there too, and a vet told us they even quarantine animal embryos and semen, and bees at that facility. Plus lots of plants.

Before visiting the cats, we had lunch in the Sydney suburb of Rooty Hill. When you think of Sydney, you think of the Opera House, of Sydney Harbour (technically called Port Jackson), of beautiful million-dollar houses on the glittering water, of Bondi Beach, of fine dining and Olympic sporting facilities.

None of that is to be seen at Rooty Hill, a good 25 miles from the water. The main shopping area is like an old downtown of some small town in America, shops lining both sides of the street. But downtown is split in half by the train that runs right through Rooty Hill -- you have to climb over the train station on a pedestrian walkway. The downtown is full of small shops, take-out joints, and small restaurants, including several Philippine-food restaurants that indicates the presence of a Philippino immigrant community there.

Having eaten Philippino food before, we knew better than to try it again. So we went into the bistro attached to a little hotel that was built in 1890, and had a couple of very good sandwiches in a dingy, depressing little casino. The neighborhoods around the downtown featured neat but small houses and the commute from there to downtown Sydney was probably better than an hour. Clearly not one of Sydney's more glamorous suburbs.

Something in the Air

Big fires burning in northeastern Victoria -- you can smell the smoke all the way in Canberra. Hundreds of people in Melbourne called the fire departments, smelling smoke and thinking THEIR house was on fire. It was a dry winter and it's a hot spring, so all expectations are for a bad wildfire season.

Hopefully not as bad as in 2003, when 500 homes in Canberra burned...

Faux Australian

An Aussie journalist in New York points out that Outback Steakhouse is about as authentically Australian as, well as Mongolian barbecues are really Mongolian. Think about it -- the Outback calls clam chowder an "Outback classic." Not many clams in the Australian outback, last I heard. Plenty of salt, but not much water. Similarly, Mongolian barbecues feature dishes like shrimp and chicken, when in fact both shrimp and chickens are notoriously difficult for people leading a nomadic lifestyle to herd to new pastures...

Outback Steakhouse was founded by Americans looking for a fun theme for their planned restaurant -- and what's funner than the land of Crocodile Dundee (or at least, the stereotype of Australia that Paul Hogan's character, and later Steve Irwin, represent). And much the same, "Mongolian barbecue" was coined by some savvy Chinese in the US looking for an exotic name to put on his Sino-American cooking -- and what's more exotic than Mongolia, even though their food is completely dissimilar (and alas, far inferior) to Chinese cuisine.

But they do serve good steaks all the same.

Yorick Goes to the Mall

I have a friend getting married next Saturday, so I had to go to the mall to buy a gift.

That sentence is literally true -- I "had to" go to the mall to buy the gift because although my friend is registered at a large department store called Myer, Myer's wedding registries are not available on-line. You have to actually go to the store to a special desk where somebody has access to the registry. Give her the number, and she will print off the list of things on said registry that haven't been purchased yet. You buy the stuff, and bring it back to her so she can check it off the list.

So my officemates and I did that. But it seemed so 1993 somehow. I mean, Myer has the registry on a computer already. How hard would it be to make it available on-line?

Anyway, it was sort of interesting wandering around Myer while waiting to get the registry, and again while waiting for the gifts we bought to be wrapped. For the first time in my certain knowledge, I touched a pot that cost over $350 (US). "It's French," our savvy office management specialist said, as if that simple concept were all the explanation needed to account for the ungodly pricetag. It was certainly heavy, so I guess it could also double as a weapon; you could clobber any intruders with the lid if they had the temerity to invade your kitchen while you were sauteeing mushrooms or doing some other French cooking technique.

And the store was full of Christmas schlock. Australian Christmas schlock bears a strong resemblence to American schlock. Not real surprising, although there were certainly a lot more Christmas-themed beach towels than you'd see in a typical mall in Ohio. They had an assortment of truly odd Christmas ornaments. My favorite was the kangaroo with wings. Yes, wings. Must be an optimistic view of the kangaroo afterlife; after being hit by a truck they get wings and get to adorn plastic Christmas trees. Beats the 7th circle of hell, I guess.

"I Like Bing Lee"

I was calling around this morning trying to get specs on various ovens, and one of the shops I called is an electronics store called Bing Lee. The salesclerk was helping me, and put me on hold for a couple of minutes. The muzak was playing some Bing Lee agitprop, including a little background song where they just go "I like Bing Lee."

After a few seconds, I realized I'd heard that tune before. After a few seconds more, I realized it was lifted directly from the Monty Python skit where they sing "I like Chinese." Exactly the same tune!

Of course, the Pythons probably lifted the tune themselves from somewhere else in the first place...